7 Plugins for Maximizing Visitors’ Time On-site

Keeping visitors on your site for longer is a tough thing to do. It’s necessary to not only provide great content, but also extra elements that might catch their interest. When staying on-site longer, there’s a greater chance that they’ll end up buying something and it also looks great to Google when the average site visit duration is extended too.

Here are seven WordPress plugins that can help increase visitors’ time on-site.

1. Add a Quiz

The quizzes can be easily set up just in a couple of minutes which is great news for busy webmasters. They can make customers stop and pay attention or just have a little fun to pass the time. The fact that your quiz might even go viral is something that is attractive to both visitors and webmasters alike.

2. Share Your Instagram

When the site has a busy Instagram page with plenty of fresh content, it’s a great idea to include a feed of the Instagram account directly on the site. It shows mobile-savvy visitors that you’re active on one of the largest photo and video sharing sites online. They don’t have to fire up their Instagram and locate your account – the feed does that for them.

The Smash Balloon Instagram plugin already has 800,000 installations. It offers a host of customizable features including choosing whether to include a full-sized recent Instagram image within your post, to permit unlimited loading of more photos, or to display content randomly or in chronological order.

Don’t lose your visitors to your Instagram page – bring your “Insta” content to your site instead. This should make your site even stickier.

3. Social Sharing

Social sharing is huge. It’s a great way to let visitors share your content on one of their social accounts without leaving the site.

There are many different social sharing plugins for WordPress. Each has its pros and cons. Social Warfare is one of the longest running with many useful features. It’s robust and runs on sites that get millions of monthly visitors without missing a beat.

Easy Social Share Buttons is another recommended plugin, but it’s sold on Code Canyon as a premium plugin. It’s graphically superior to many other social plugins and has gained a strong following too.

4. Speedy Loading

Improving your site loading speed is a big thing to keep people on-site. They’re more likely to look at other pages when the site loads up fast the first time. However, if it took an age to load, they’re going to be reluctant to navigate around to find more content.

A plugin like W3 Total Cache provides caching to help the site load faster initially and sooner for subsequent pages or future visits. When your site is snappy, clicking around it becomes encouraged.

5. Improve Your Search

While most site owners don’t give search a second thought – to them, search means Google and not search for their site – many visitors rely on it to find what they’re looking for.

In these days of streamlined navigation and a lack of breadcrumb navigational cues, it’s getting harder to find relevant content. Also, on mobile devices, the sidebar drops to the very bottom of the page, so extra navigation in the sidebar disappears for smartphone and tablet users too.

JetPack Search which is part of the premium pack from JetPack – from WordPress creators, Automattic – is one of the most affordable options. AJAX search is another interesting plugin.

6. Add Slideshows to Your Site

SlideShare performed well as an independent way to create and present slideshows to the world. It was then bought out by LinkedIn. It’s possible to add a SlideShare and then embed it into a WordPress page. Then there are easy controls to move forward and back through the presentation slides to access the slideshow right on the page.

The SlideShare plugin from SEO provider, Yoast, is just one way to embed a slideshow on a site to keep visitors flicking through it.

7. Video Content

Adding video content on a page is a great way to keep people on-site longer. It’s also looked at as a good thing for SEO. There are many YouTube WP plugins to make it easier to embed a YouTube video. Some are also compatible with Vimeo videos too.

Google has recently started to downgrade some of the options with embedded videos such as removing the ability to display the video without a title or removing the reel of other related videos that displays when pausing the content. It’s also currently possible to take out the YouTube button that lets visitors click through to YouTube directly too.

Implementing any of these plugins and adding suitable content where appropriate is going to help boost time on-site. Then it’s up to your site optimization to turn those viewers into buyers.